The Return of an Old Cold...

The old man is blind, his left arm is a gnarled stump, and shrapnel wounds scar his belly. After 32 years of la causa , he lives in a dark, little apartment by the Miami River, while Fidel Castro--a man he once tried to kill--still rules Cuba with an iron fist.

But Tony Cuesta has just begun to fight.

“Some people think I’m forgotten,” he snaps, jabbing at the air with his stump. “They should read the newspapers.”

Jan. 6, 1992: The Cuban government announces the capture of three anti-Castro guerrillas who were trying to infiltrate Havana on a small rubber raft. After convicting them of terrorism and sabotage, military officials execute one commando and sentence the others to 30-year prison terms.

In Miami’s huge Cuban-American community, there is much talk about the doomed raid, but even more about Cuesta, an aging provocateur who has seemingly come out of retirement to strut on center stage. At a dramatic news conference, the former Havana businessman reveals that he organized the mission and vows to launch more clandestine raids until Cuba is liberated.

It was a gritty performance by Cuesta, who is perhaps the best known of the Cuban commandos still waging a private war against Castro. More than 30 years after the Bay of Pigs, he and other die-hards continue plans for a day of reckoning with Castro. Some stage war games in the Everglades, plotting mock attacks. Others, like Cuesta, launch speedboat raids from the shadowy docks and marinas of South Florida, hoping to trigger a revolt in Cuba.

Brash, secretive and supremely confident, they angrily deny that time has passed them by. And no one reflects their cockiness better than Cuesta, a tall, bearded guerrilla leader who is under FBI scrutiny for his most recent exploit. He claims to have organized 33 raids against Cuba since 1960.

“I think Castro is closer to the end now,” says Cuesta. “But we need to match up people in exile and people in Cuba for the final uprising to bring justice. I believe we commandos can be the detonator of that charge.”

Here in Miami, where talk radio crackles with the intrigue and melodrama of Cuban politics, fiery words like Cuesta’s are routine. They’re heard constantly in a town where callers spout florid denunciations of Castro and fill the airwaves with wild rumors of his impending death.

But it’s not every day that a fading folk hero of the Cuban resistance shakes off the cobwebs and sparks an international incident. The Dec. 29 raid put Cuesta back on the map, triggering criticism from State Department officials, Cuban human rights activists and some prominent Cuban-Americans. All said the mission was counterproductive, because it strengthened Castro’s hand at a time when his country is plagued with unrest and economic turmoil.

A few critics complained that Cuesta was too coy about the raid, revealing only that it was designed to cause a “commotion” inside Cuba. Although he planned the mission with a secret group called Commandos L, the one-armed man said it was carried out by an organization called April 19.

“Good luck to the FBI agents trying to sort out the details,” wrote one local columnist.

Yet the mission struck a different chord in the bars and cafes of Miami’s Little Havana, where many of Florida’s 850,000 Cubans live. There, old-timers lifted a glass to Cuesta and toasted the warrior who had lost his eyes and arm in a 1966 mission against Castro. Years later, he was coming back for more.

“A lot of people may not agree with everything he did,” says Emilio Milian, a prominent Cuban-American radio commentator. “But when I do my show, I never hear people say really bad things about Tony Cuesta. Other people get criticized, not Tony. Down here, they genuinely like this man.”

It’s hard not to. Inviting a visitor into his small study, Cuesta speaks rapidly and intensely, happy to tell his story. He’s quick-witted, amiable and speaks with a thick accent. He promises full cooperation, but some questions clearly rankle. Asked why a blind man pushing 70 doesn’t walk away from a losing battle, Cuesta shakes his stump as if to banish the thought.

“It is impossible for me to retire,” he says. “It may sound strange to average people, but if you want to fight for your country, after you pass the first five years, you become some kind of cool fanatic.”

A cool fanatic. There’s no better way to describe Cuesta, who claims without a trace of irony that victory over Castro is just around the corner.

Some may laugh at a man who sends three commandos to Cuba on a raft, but Cuesta has heard it all before. In the days after the raid, for example, he was criticized by Maria Gonzales, mother of the guerrilla whom Castro executed. Cuesta’s response was calm and controlled, a perfect TV sound bite.

“I would never argue with the pain of a mother,” he told reporters. “But her children acted in a patriotic, legitimate, voluntary manner.”

Ever since he fled Cuba in 1960, bitterly disillusioned with the revolution, Cuesta has devoted his life to la causa , the exiles’ struggle to topple the Havana regime. He launched his own campaign in the aftermath of the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, when a Cuban-American invasion force backed tentatively by the United States suffered a humiliating defeat.

Over the years, Castro has mocked the vigilantes who harass him. But the ongoing battle has made Cuesta a celebrity in Little Havana. Living quietly with his fourth wife, Maria, he survives on disability checks and keeps a low profile, appearing periodically on radio talk shows. Then, every few years, he bursts into the news again, drawing threats of retaliation from Havana.

“This man is a vulgar mercenary masquerading as a freedom fighter,” says Ariel Ricardo, spokesman for the Cuban government in Washington. “How could I respect him? He has committed acts of violence against our country.”

Cuesta’s raids began in March, 1962, when he and fellow crew members bombed a Cuban freighter and machine-gunned a British ship on Cuba’s northern shore. The incident sparked protests and warnings from U.S. officials that such actions violated American foreign policy. Coast Guard police were put on the alert for Cuesta, who was cruising the Florida straits in a powerful 24-foot boat and seemed capable of striking Cuba at any time.

A year later, Cuesta triggered an even bigger incident by sinking a Soviet freighter in a Cuban port with a homemade bomb. His brazen attack enraged Moscow and led to tougher U.S. controls over the activities of exile commandos. But the guerrilla raids continued and Cuesta appeared in a November, 1963, Life magazine story, vowing to carry on the fight.

His celebrity soared after a 1966 raid, which was designed to smuggle hit men into Havana and assassinate Castro. It backfired: Cuesta was fired on by a Soviet ship and began speeding back to Miami when he was encircled by Cuban speedboats. Rather than surrender, he blew up his ship with a crude hand grenade. The explosion ripped off his left arm, burned his eyes and riddled his body with shrapnel. He spent 12 years in Cuban jails as a political prisoner and, after being included in a mass release of other inmates, returned to a hero’s welcome in Miami.

“With these people, the grand gesture is everything,” says Carl Hiaasen, a Miami Herald columnist. “If Charlie Manson got out and led a flotilla of rafts to Havana, they’d give him a parade, too. The mere act transcends everything, and that’s why there always an audience for this kind of thing.”

But it’s been harder for Cuesta and other commandos to carry on as the years go by. With the collapse of his Soviet ally, Castro is more isolated than ever, and U.S. officials see him as less of a threat. More important, the exile community that once showered Cuesta and other guerrilla leaders with support has settled into a life of affluence in Florida.

People who once clamored for an immediate return to Cuba now pay less attention to underground groups such as Cuesta’s. Indeed, some Cubans privately view them as an embarrassment, a rogue’s gallery of zealots whose paranoia toward outsiders and secrecy with each other is almost laughable.

In a recent Miami Herald poll, only one in five Cuban-Americans said they would return home if Castro was toppled. The younger generation, heavily immersed in American culture, is even less interested. Few of them talk about buying guns to settle the score with Castro, like their parents once did.

To be sure, the great majority of Cuban-Americans still view Castro’s ouster as a top priority. Municipal elections that focus elsewhere on sewage and taxes are dominated here by strident arguments over who hates Castro more. But the air of emergency that once gripped the community has eased, and people such as Cuesta are increasingly seen as agitators with little or no constituency.

“He’s a minority within a minority,” says Raul Masvidal, a Miami businessman and former mayoral candidate. “You don’t see many people openly supporting his tactics anymore, with paramilitary actions and so forth. It’s become outdated. . . . There’s no future in this.”

Even the ultraconservative Cuban American National Foundation, the community’s most militant lobbying group in Washington, offers only a tepid endorsement of Cuesta, saying he has a right to fight Castro any way he chooses. “We respect all ideas and methods,” says spokesman Roberto Martin Perez.

But the working stiffs of Little Havana tell a different story.

George Hernandez, a taxi driver, says he admires Cuesta because he lives in virtual poverty and acts purely on his beliefs: “He’s not getting rich off the Cuban problem, like a lot of businessmen here who talk tough about Castro here but do nothing. Tony Cuesta is a man of action.”

In a nearby cafe, Angel Gonzales, 65, sips a cup of cafe Cubano and says Cuesta is a hero to many, even if they don’t agree with his tactics: “He has given everything. His arm. His eyes. Who can forget his story?”

Looking back, Cuesta marvels that he became a commando. Born in Santiago, Cuba, and raised in a middle-class home, he says he studied to become a veterinarian and was a member of the Cuban swim team at the 1950 Pan-American Games. But it’s hard to verify all the facts, because there are some Cuesta won’t divulge.

Like the year of his birth. The guerrilla leader says only that he was born on June 13, because if Castro had more precise data, he could make a “timetable” of Cuesta’s activities. “It has nothing to do with vanity,” Cuesta explains. “You can say that I’m two, three years younger than Fidel.”

That would put Cuesta somewhere in his mid-60s. But long before, he showed traces of the brash style that marks him now. During the Pan-American Games, he met and later married his first wife, Cedalia. The couple divorced six years later, and she recalls Tony as a man drawn to danger.

He had a passion for violent wrestling matches, for example, which his wife implored him to give up. Cuesta refused and suffered a serious ear injury in a later contest. Once, he developed ringworm on his foot and simply burned off the infection with a match. When she learned of Cuesta’s recent raid, the Miami resident recalls: “I said to myself, ‘That’s Tony. He’s not afraid of anything.’ ”

Cuesta’s father, a bus company administrator, and his mother, a history teacher, encouraged him to find a profession, and Tony eventually became a businessman in Havana. By 1952 he was running a local ITT subsidiary and had become a father. Then the Cuban revolution intervened.

Soon after Castro began rallying military opposition to Fulgencio Batista’s corrupt regime, Cuesta joined the fight. He raised money, smuggled weapons and fought alongside Castro in the Sierra Maestra region. He grew close to Che Guevara, another charismatic rebel leader, and remembers that the young Castro was a warm, engaging man who didn’t hold grudges against his enemies.

Batista fled Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, and Cuesta became chief of intelligence in the Cuban National Police. But his time in power was brief. A political moderate, Cuesta decided on his own to forge ties with the Miami bureau of the FBI, reasoning that Cuba could profit from such intelligence links.

When he returned to Havana, Castro was livid and put him in jail for several weeks. It became clear that Castro, who once billed himself as an independent revolutionary, was developing close ties with the Soviet Union. When he made comments that non-communists might have to be “eliminated,” Cuesta saw the writing on the wall. He fled his homeland in June, 1960.

Within a year, Cuesta was organizing raids against Cuba, and they continued until his crippling injuries during the 1966 raid. After the explosion on his boat, Cuesta was captured and sentenced to 30 years in a series of Cuban prisons. It was the spiritual and political turning point of his life.

Rather than comply with his captors, he lived the life of a plantado , a prisoner who resisted Castro politically. He waged hunger strikes, manufactured small radios to hear the Voice of America and vowed to survive the experience, even as other prisoners were disappearing every day.

Seven years later, Cuesta made the painful decision to divorce his second wife, Lourdes, who had given birth to his second child. It seemed as if he would die in prison, Cuesta explains, and it would have been unfair for his family to live alone. Meanwhile, he began adjusting to his traumatic injuries:

“I said to myself, ‘Tony, you must face this. Or else you’ll be a blind man in bed waiting for someone to help you.’ I said, ‘I’m still Tony Cuesta.’ ”

His family launched an international campaign to get him released and persuaded such celebrities as Pablo Casals to write to Castro on Cuesta’s behalf. The answer was always no, but Cuesta got a dramatic reprieve in 1978, when negotiations between Cuban exiles and Castro led to his release, along with 78 other prisoners. He came home determined to resume the war.

In the years since, Cuesta married and divorced a third time, finally settling down in his fourth marriage to journalist Maria Aurelia Garcia. As the Cold War began to end, his political agitation took on a new slant.

Even though he is blind, Cuesta helped sail ships to Cuba in 1980 as part of the Mariel boat lift. Two years later, he protested the U.S. deportation of a Cuban refugee and was accused by police of setting off a riot by making incendiary comments on a radio station. In 1988, he organized an airlift over Cuba of balloons holding packets of razor blades, coffee and anti-Castro literature.

Has all this accomplished anything? Cuesta stiffens and shifts in his chair.

“My happiest time was when I was blind and in prison,” he says. “I was convinced I was giving all I could for the salvation of my country.”

The question is posed again, and Cuesta says it would have been unthinkable for him to live his life any other way. One day, he plans to return to Cuba and build speedboats. That day, he firmly believes, is coming soon.

Whether it does or not, Cuesta could ask for no better epitaph than the final moments of his 1966 raid, when the deadly explosion rocked his boat and threw him overboard. As he tossed in the water, Cuesta says a crew member screamed out in pain that he was losing blood and sinking fast:

“I called out to him, ‘Goodby, my friend, goodby. At least I showed these people how we fight.’ ”

RAID ON THE BAKU Cuban exile Tony Cuesta says he has conducted 33 “infiltrations” of his former homeland. In one of his more daring raids in 1963, Cuesta and his commandos blew a hole in a Russian merchant ship, the Baku. The vessel, its holds packed with 10,000 tons of cane sugar bound for the USSR, sank in the Cuban port of Caibarien. Cuesta and his men escaped, returning to Maimi where they were met by a diplomatic maelstrom. After strong protests from the Soviets, the U.S. confiscated a boat used in Cuestra’s raid and confined the commandos to Dade County. At MIAMI March 18,1963: Under cover of darkness, Cuesta sets out from Miami aboard a 43-foot yacht, the Alisan , and heads south through the Straits of Florida. Cuesta and his crew later rendezvous with a speedboat, the Phoenix . At ANGUILLA March 19: On a tiny island in the Anguilla Cays, Cuesta and his commandos pick up an arms cache. They wait eight days for weather conditions to improve. At CAIBARIEN March 27: Cuesta crosses Nicholas Channel to the port of Caibarien. Attacking with the high-speed Phoenix, they spray the Baku with gunfire and set a homemade, 50-pound charge of dynamite against the hull of the Soviet ship. The bomb explodes, the ship sinks and the commandos escape back to Miami.

Times researcher Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.